Reports quoting an unnamed police official from the southern province of Helmand said the attack took place in the Nawzad district on May 25 and resulted in the deaths of 19 police officers and seven soldiers."

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

In a separate incident, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports that at least one civilian has been killed and three policemen injured in an ongoing stand-off between two suspected suicide attackers and police in the southern province of Kandahar.

The provincial governor's spokesman, Samim Khepilwak, said security forces had surrounded the building where the attackers were hiding in the provincial capital, Kandahar city.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, Taliban suicide bombers attacked a court in Wardak province on May 26, killing two police officers before being shot dead as they entered the compound.

Wardak police chief Khalil Andarabi said the police officers were killed when one of the bombers detonated his vest at the first entrance.

Andarabi said the bombers "managed to enter the compound, but our security forces were prepared and shot them dead before they reached the second entrance."

Wardak province is about an hour's drive west of the capital.

On May 25, five people were killed and more than 60 wounded in a suicide truck bombing in Kalat, the capital of the southern province of Zabul.